Film Freak Centraltag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-999282957331064452013-11-12T20:20:03-05:00TypePadMonsters University (2013) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c019b00ff554b970b2013-11-12T20:20:03-05:002013-11-13T00:47:52-05:00click any image to enlarge **/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon directed by Dan Scanlon by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer's alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born. RUNNING TIME 104 minutes MPAA G ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES English 7.1 Dolby TrueHD French DD Plus 7.1 Spanish DD 5.1 SUBTITLES English English SDH French Spanish REGION All DISC TYPE BD-50 + BD-25 STUDIO Disney The deceptively simple Monsters, Inc. is my favourite of the golden-age Pixar titles. Released when Gulf War II was ramping up, it's an allegory for the fat cats who run Big Oil and the need for alternative fuels that are safer to harvest, with heroes Mike...Bill ChambersUp (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c016767c3a914970b2012-06-22T11:14:49-05:002012-06-22T11:14:49-05:00***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras N/A screenplay by Bob Peterson directed by Pete Docter by Walter Chaw There's still something breathless about Up, but I wonder if the Pixar formula isn't starting to show its seams now in its second decade of producing masterpieces--if there's a lack of freshness here in its familiarly exhilarated, cozily excited spaces. None of that fatigue is in evidence in the film's miraculous, wordless prologue, however: destined to compete with the opening-credits sequence of Watchmen as the single best stretch in any film this year, it establishes character, motivation, story of place, and sense of time without leaving a dry eye in the house. Shame the picture also peaks in these first ten minutes. It reminds of the wordless bit describing Jessie's abandonment in Toy Story 2, or the entire first half of WALL·E, and it suggests that Pixar is unparalleled in exploiting the possibilities for visual storytelling in its cavernous digital medium. The comparison of WALL·E to Chaplin is on point: When Pixar trusts the expressiveness of its mainframe and the beautiful, liquid clarity of its animation techniques, I don't know that there's ever been a better "silent" filmmaking collective. In their roster,...Bill ChambersToy Story 3 (2010) [2-Disc] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0177429ecb9e970d2012-06-22T11:04:07-05:002012-06-22T11:08:26-05:00***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A- screenplay by Michael Arndt directed by Lee Unkrich by Walter Chaw Woody (Tom Hanks) refuses to shake Buzz's (Tim Allen) hand in farewell at around the middle point of Pixar's Toy Story 3, marking a dark return of sorts to the petulant Woody of the first film and a harbinger of things to come as the picture closes with sights and sounds that are easily darker than anything dreamed of in its predecessors. Maybe it's the comfort that comes with being part of an established franchise--with the knowledge that the only watermark to exceed is that left by its own thorny, complex second chapter. Whatever the case, Toy Story 3 is more ambitious than Toy Story 2 yet less successful as well, mainly because the first half of it seems uncharacteristically uncertain of itself. It's a feeling of awkwardness that in retrospect coalesces into this idea that maybe it's dread that colours our reintroduction to these characters. Half of their number is gone without explanation, after all, including Woody's love interest, Bo. He grieves for her. We'll come back to this. Their owner, Andy, prepares to go to college, leaving the toys to...Bill ChambersToy Story (1995) [Special Edition] + Toy Story 2 (1999) [Special Edition] - Blu-ray + DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017615b90cf6970c2012-06-22T10:51:33-05:002012-08-25T11:27:57-05:00TOY STORY **½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A screenplay by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow directed by John Lasseter TOY STORY 2 ****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A- screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin & Chris Webb directed by John Lasseter TOY STORY 2 by Walter Chaw What time and memory seem to obscure about Pixar's Toy Story is that it is, for the most part, shrill and unpleasant, though it's easier to identify now that Pixar's technical facility is familiar. The picture's thick with bad behaviour, with everybody's favourite vintage cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) acting the spoiled, wounded, ultimately dangerous brat, jilted by his owner for a newer model, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and determined to murder his rival until some moral compass asserts itself and Woody, grudgingly, comes to Jesus with his inevitable obsolescence. Toy Story plays a weird game with the idea of mortality in that its heroes are toys and, as such, doomed to a kind of infernal immortal half-life during which they can be tortured any number of ways--de-limbed, decapitated and reconstituted, melted, waterboarded we presume--in the name of a child's development. A memorable...Bill ChambersA Bug's Life (1998) - [2-Disc Collector's Edition] DVD + Blu-ray Disctag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017615b6465c970c2012-06-22T00:48:17-05:002012-06-22T00:49:07-05:00**/**** DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+ BD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+ screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Donald McEnery & Bob Shaw directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton by Walter Chaw The Seven Samurai by way of ¡Three Amigos!, Pixar's A Bug's Life stands as the company's sole artistic disappointment, suffering from a weightlessness that is particularly troubling given that it is also the only Pixar production whose characters don't interact with the human world. The revelation embedded in its relative failure is that the animation studio is better at satire than it is at fantasy--not a terrible thing, for sure (after all, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki has never made a film independent of the human realm), the picture still points to the damning difficulty of creating a fantasy unto itself and based on alien quirk that is more than an exercise in Flintstones-era visual punning wrapped around a familiar underdog-uplift narrative. Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada RUNNING TIME 95 minutes MPAA G ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.33:1, 16x9-enhanced 1.33:1 LANGUAGES English DD 5.1 English DD 2.0 (Stereo - music-only - widescreen) English DD 5.1 (Effects-only - fullscreen) French DD 5.1 (Fullscreen) SUBTITLES...Bill ChambersMonsters, Inc. (2001)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c0177429b3001970d2012-06-21T21:49:48-05:002012-06-21T21:49:48-05:00***/**** starring the voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly screenplay by Dan Gerson & Andrew Stanton directed by Peter Docter and David Silverman & Lee Unkrich by Walter Chaw Ten feet tall and covered in blue and purple fur, James "Sully" Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) is the leading scarer at Monsters, Inc. and best friend to his "handler/assistant," a green nebbish of a cyclops named Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). Despite their occupation, they're sweet fellas; less so is Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi), a colour-changing, chameleonic thing who is jealous of Sully's reputation. When a dreaded child escapes into the monster's factory, Sully and Mike gradually unearth Randall's nefarious plot to overtake Sully for "Most Bloodcurdling" while trying to hide the renegade kid from their tick-like boss Henry J. Waternoose (James Coburn) and Celia (Jennifer Tilly), Mike's girlfriend. Buy This at Allposters.com The cleverness of Pixar Animation's new Monsters, Inc. begins with the homonym embedded in its title, touches base in a sushi restaurant affectionately called Harryhausen's (after the late, great stop-motion animator), and carries on through a brief shot of a television monster psychiatric expert appearing in the shape of a hot dog as Freud...Bill ChambersFinding Nemo (2003) [2-Disc Collector's Edition] - DVDtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c016767be883e970b2012-06-21T19:46:08-05:002012-06-21T19:47:06-05:00****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A- screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Bob Peterson & David Reynolds directed by Andrew Stanton by Walter Chaw The perfect American parable for an anxious new millennium, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo is riddled with nightmares and weighted by the existential smallness of its heroic pair, finding a certain immutable gravity in the fear and hope represented by children, rekindled, both, by the spate of child-on-child violence ending our last thousand years. Following hot on horror films that, like the horror films of the late-'60s/early-'70s, focus on unapologetically evil children (then: Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, now: The Ring, Identity, Soft for Digging), what Finding Nemo does is present generational paranoia from a parent's point of view, opening as it does with an act of senseless, heartbreaking violence in the middle of an idyllic suburbia. It's not the horror (at this point) of a child facing social ostracism in the school environment, but the horror of making a choice to escape a bad environment only to find oneself in the middle of an upper middle-class tinder pile about to light. Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada...Bill ChambersThe Incredibles (2004) - [2-Disc Collector's Edition - Widescreen] DVD + 2-Disc Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01774298ab3c970d2012-06-21T16:26:39-05:002012-06-21T16:26:39-05:00****/**** DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+ BD - Image A Sound A Extras A+ written and directed by Brad Bird by Walter Chaw The first hint that there's something at work in The Incredibles far beyond the pale is the casting of Sarah Vowell as the voice of wilting Violet, the wallflower older sister in the Incredibles' nuclear family. Vowell herself is a brilliant satirist, a gifted writer, and in her heart o' hearts, a bona fide autobiographical anthropologist. She mines the tragedies of her life for insight into the thinness of the onionskin separating our ability to function with the iron undertow of self-doubt and disappointment that comprises all of our paralyzed yesterdays. The Incredibles does a lot of things well--a lot of the same things, as it happens, that Sarah Vowell does well. Through two Toy Story films and last year's fantastically topical Finding Nemo, Pixar has provided the new gold standard in children's entertainment, and it has consistently done so by injecting an amazing amount of insight and depth into the foundation of its bells and whistles. Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada RUNNING TIME 115 minutes MPAA PG ASPECT RATIO(S) 2.39:1,...Bill ChambersCars (2006)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01774298a5b3970d2012-06-21T13:06:34-05:002012-06-21T13:06:34-05:00*½/**** screenplay by John Lasseter & Philip Loren & Kiel Murray directed by John Lasseter by Walter Chaw Soulless and anchorless, Pixar's Cars is the company's first all-around failure. It's got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug's Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast. It's telling that a company pioneering machine-tooled animation so relies on that hint of humanity for its effectiveness; in its place, Cars resorts to cheap name-games (all the cities are car-parts except, dubiously, Los Angeles) as its primary gag and relies on a string of racing in-jokes (Darrell Cartrip, get it? Yeah, me neither) to lubricate its worn-down gears. It's the product of the "Larry the Cable Guy" school of redneck effacement tacked onto a tired redemption romantic comedy, even more tired fish-out-of-water malarkey, and finally an inexplicable blanket criticism of all things urban. Sub-vaudeville gags with weak payoffs and rudderless execution are the things one would rightly expect from a DreamWorks flick--pity that...Bill ChambersWALL·E (2008)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c016767bd715e970b2012-06-21T13:00:43-05:002012-06-21T13:00:43-05:00***½/**** screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon directed by Andrew Stanton by Walter Chaw What curbs Andrew Stanton's WALL·E from being a complete triumph is an extended Battle Royale in the middle of the film between a ship's captain and his HAL-like autopilot--more Mack Sennett than Stanley Kubrick, it's a moment that panders to the diaper set instead of, as the rest of the picture does, elevating animation ever-so-delicately into a medium in the United States instead of a genre. Here in this children's film, find a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland--a ruined Manhattan with towers of trash stacked higher than its abandoned skyscrapers by a robot, WALL·E, left behind for seven hundred years while humanity waits in orbit for Earth to become inhabitable again. It's never clear what devastated the planet, though there are suggestions aplenty that it has something to do with unfettered consumerism and terminal neglect by its human stewards, as the film opens with an elegant, eloquent, wordless forty-minutes of WALL·E nursing a connection with his absent masters through endless viewings of the "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" sequence from Hello, Dolly!--the one that ends with a lovely moment of hands held in new love, which becomes...Bill ChambersBrave (2012)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c017615aafb52970c2012-06-20T11:19:06-05:002012-11-25T15:58:23-05:00**½/**** screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman by Walter Chaw Brave...isn't. Not very. It's by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it's better than either Cars, that's only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something's for children, we mean that it's better--unless we're talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company's pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap 'em on and jump back in the ol' computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity. Buy This at Allposters.com Anyone who's ever seen a Disney movie...Bill ChambersRatatouille (2007)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c016305a1d398970d2012-05-18T10:05:51-05:002012-05-18T10:08:30-05:00****/**** written and directed by Brad Bird by Walter Chaw Brad Bird's latest film Ratatouille is the auteur's affirmation that it's possible, no matter the station, to find genius among the rabble. It's charmingly egalitarian, this idea that any class or creed can produce the next Einstein or Baryshnikov, and it seems a direct response to the critics of his The Incredibles who would say that that superhero film's mantra of "if everyone is super, no one is" is an embodiment of intolerance and classism. Ratatouille's answer is a lot like the one offered by Bird's feature debut, The Iron Giant: that not only is it possible to overcome one's basic programming, but also that choice supersedes predestination and, moreover, that a basic morality governs the actions of all things. A lot to put on the doorstep of a film about a rat, Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), who wishes he could be a chef in the kitchen of idol Gasteau (Brad Garrett)--but Bird, in the course of just three films (and stints with "The Simpsons" and "The Critic"), has forged a pretty formidable ideology based on, of all alien things, the sociology of common sense. Some people are more...Bill ChambersCars 2 (2011)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a0168ea36d6b2970c01676695a72c970b2012-05-18T09:57:30-05:002012-05-18T09:57:30-05:00*½/**** screenplay by Ben Queen directed by John Lasseter by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the '50s Americana of the original for '60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children's movies have beaten into the ground since 1966's The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn's liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily...Bill Chambers